As mobile phones and other mobile electronic devices become more technologically advanced and include more features, the cost to purchase these mobile devices increases, as does the cost to replace them should they break. To prophylactically protect such devices from damage or breakage, protective cases have been devised to reduce the risk that a mobile device breaks should it be dropped or otherwise exposed to an impact force.
In particular, two types of materials have generally been employed to reduce the impact force on a mobile device, namely, elastic and resilient materials that absorb impact forces (“soft cases”), and fracture-resistant plastics (“hard cases”). Mobile device cases typically include one or the other of these materials, or include a softer resilient case surrounding a harder plastic case. The resultant device cases often suffer from protection limitations and a low quality user experience. For example, cases exclusively composed of high durometer plastics, or similarly hard materials, often include jagged or sharp corners providing an uncomfortable feeling in the user's hand. Further, high durometer plastic cases, while lending overall durability to the case, often rupture at connection points on two-piece clam shelled cases owing to a lack of resiliency, potentially exposing the mobile device to an impact force. In particular, should a mobile device case be dropped on one of its corners, the impact may cause the corners to flex inward and transfer the entire impulse force to the mobile device, which often leads to fracture of the device case and the mobile phone.
Conversely, soft resilient cases such as those made from rubber or other elastomeric materials, while providing impact protection, are often large and unwieldy, which mitigates the benefits of having a slim profile mobile device. Further, rubber or elastomeric cases still suffer from the drawbacks of hard cases, namely flexion at the corners during impact, transferring the impact force to the mobile device. As a result, mobile device cases composed of rubber or elastomers, while providing some degree of impact protection, may not be aesthetically desirable to consumers and still transfer impact forces to the mobile device at the corners.